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Rh me, personally, a poem is a thing that sings. One suffers from the dim weight of one's own soul, never from sense. I see some of them have been set to music, but that proves nothing. Musical words seldom set well : they have the tune in them already, and will not take another."

"As to Swinburne, I believe he has so much power over me that he will not let me read his bad things ; in the Poems and Ballads, the pages turned over as though some one else was turning them, till at the wonderful Litany the invisible presence said 'Halt ! ' I began and ended with that. One such poem is enough, not for a morning's reading, but for a lifetime, if only the last two lines might be prophetic —

'The gold is turned to a token, The staff to a rod, Yet thou shalt bind up them that are broken, O Lord our God !'"

" I find no reason why I should not read Swinburne's Poems: certainly I had little more than an hour, and so perhaps had only time to get the good in them. And of course it is possible that I may have read something very bad without knowing it: in which case it cannot have done me much harm. It is really comical, after entering a book, as one would a fish-market, ready to close eyes and nose, to find one's self in a grand heathen oratorio : — heathen certainly, but, all the more for that, with a deep pathetic truth underlying its despair and unrest. Surely such music cannot be destined for Satan's palaces. * * * Do you remember how Sir Walter Scott resolved to give up writing poetry after reading Byron ? One could scarcely help coming to the same determination after Swinburne ; only, I suppose, it would be like